Tim Sweeney claims it’s a “Scarlet Letter” which makes players “try to kill the game”
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has criticised rival Valve for forcing studios to disclose when they use AI in game development.
Epic recently showed how it was integrating AI into Unreal Engine 6.
Time Sweeney said:
“If you want to launch a game, and get it as widely publicized as possible, you’ve got to put it on Steam so people can wish list it, and if you want to play it on Steam, then you have to get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game.
“I think it’s really irresponsible of Valve. They shouldn’t do it, because it makes it much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success. You have to choose from either not using tools that can make you way more productive, and probably failing due to competition that does.”
Which is totally ignoring the factor that the user should know about the purchase it makes and be able to decide for themselves. Transparency for the player is not a bad thing.
lol I’ll take the vote of approval! Currently the topic gets boiled down to “everything AI is slop” automatically, but removes situations where it can be used as a tool in a more “correct” sense. I would be happy if devs/studios started using it on some level to help bring back real optimizations so some games would actually use hardware to the fullest. And not just rely on people just constantly buying new GPUs or feel like the high-end hardware is a requirement.
Just need to make sure to test and re-test the results, and maybe good devs would actually go back to see how the optimizations were done to try doing it themselves (and not just get lazy/dumb in their own code). The cash grab vibe-coded slop stuff should be called out at all times. Just like the pre-AI asset flipping shit that was already flooding stores. Would also be great if bad reviews call out specific issues and not just blanket say “AI crap” or something like that to help other people have a better picture of things.